


Be There

by meliz875



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Absent Parents, Drabble, Family, Other, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 05:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meliz875/pseuds/meliz875
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Embry Call had no idea what it took to be a good father – until he had to. A drabble fic based on the Hermann Hesse poem, "Steps."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be There

Embry Call had no idea what it took to be a good father.

Everything he knew was secondhand, things he witnessed other fathers do from a distance.

Billy Black tried. He taught Embry and Jacob how to shoot a gun at the same time, and the day Embry walked in with a splotchy, half-assed goatee peppered across his chin, Billy had smiled and followed him to the bathroom.

He tried his damndest to be the father figure Embry needed.

Yet when she slid that little stick across the kitchen table, gnawing anxiously at the bottom lip in her mouth, the two pink lines reached up to knock the breath from his lungs.

Embry closed his eyes and concentrated, trying like hell to calm his pounding chest.

What he knew had to be enough.

But he suddenly wasn't so sure it would be.

He had a father figure.

He never had a father.

And standing here now, watching as they buried that father – the absent man who gave him life and nothing else – Embry still wasn't sure he was doing this right because this man hadn't been there.

He never showed Embry what it felt like to love a child. His own child. He never showed him what it took to be a father in the ways that truly mattered.

Embry froze the first time his daughter cried.

He felt like he knew nothing, and everything he did know was questioned. He wanted so much to be what she needed, but everything felt wrong because he didn't have the slightest idea where to start.

He just stood there, paralyzed, and she eventually cried herself to sleep. The weight of it, the unanswered sound of her reaching out to him – needing him – was enough to swiftly push him to the floor in the hallway outside her room.

He was already screwing this up.

He hated himself for it, but a part of him felt like he didn't know any better.

But it got easier. He learned what the cries meant, the fear ebbed slightly, and the pride he felt when she took those first steps across the kitchen made him feel like he'd explode if he tried to love her any more.

But he did. Every damn day he loved her more.

Every day he screwed up a little less.

Embry blinked as he lost focus on the open grave in front of him.

He didn't need him.

Little arms wrapped around his leg. Peering down, he was met by a wide set of brown eyes, holding in them everything he somehow managed to figure out along the way.

Embry never needed him.

She was all he needed, his chance to right the one wrong thing in his life.

She was proof of what it took.

Be strong. Be resilient. Make mistakes. Take it one day at a time.

But there was one more thing. The most important thing.

Never miss a single day.

No matter what.

Be there.

Always.


End file.
